How a cloud service pays for itself in one emergency

Imagine this scenario: It’s Friday evening and a storm that was going to hit a nearby town veers off toward your corporate HQ. Suddenly you are looking at torrential rains and flooding of biblical proportions at your corporate HQ. Oh, and to top it off it’s your major stocking location for your national distribution business.

We weren’t imagining this when Hurricane Harvey dropped trillions of gallons of rain on the Houston area. Of all the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans the one that was so very very simple was email and communication. We had already transitioned all of that to Office 365. What was our DR/BC plan for email and other written communication? We didn’t need to worry about the service. We simply made sure that key people had laptops and good to go!

Of course, all wasn’t peaches and roses.

We have a couple of areas in the business that were still using on-premises file servers. The users trying to access those servers had to use a VPN (an uncommon occurrence for many of them). That was awkward and strained our licensed capacity for VPN connections, but it wasn’t a major ordeal. Guess who is going to be pushed toward SharePoint Online Document Sites? You betcha!

The other pain point was our legacy IBM PowerSystem. None of our locations lost power/connectivity during the storm, but we watched it like a hawk to determine if we should failover to the DR site. If that system was in a cloud bank in Arizona, there is less chance of hurricane issues.

True enough, cloud-based systems have their own set of problems. However, if you go with a geo-diverse plan, the likelihood of a big storm/blizzard/earthquake halting your business are greatly reduced. This is in addition to all the typically touted benefits of OPEX vs CAPEX, hardware maintenance and all that.

The moral of the story: If you work in a hurricane zone – pay attention to the cloud.